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The Best Consequences I Used as a Coach

People often ask me about disciplining as a coach. Normally, the question is asked this way: How did you get through to multi-million dollar players and guys with strong egos? How did you get across what you wanted to do? Different coaches have various good punishments and methods of getting through to players. Obviously, I was a coach with a calmer personality so I had to be consistent in order to let my words and actions be meaningful. Here are several consequences and techniques I used to get through to players for overall team success.

The Talk

First, I talked to players all the time about not letting the team down. If our players did something wrong eventually it was going to affect us on the scoreboard and we didn’t want that to happen. After the talk, there were two actions I took that they really cared about.

Finances

They may make a lot of money, but when a player takes a hit to the wallet it hurts. So we did have some fines. Not very often, but they did happen.

Playing Time

The second thing that had even more impact was playing time. When they didn’t do things the right way and we had issues I would take away playing time. I’d tell the player, you’re not going to start, you’re not going to play in this game. That’s the thing that impacted them the most because that’s what they really wanted to do was to be out there on the field and play.